Summary Sheets

I thought it would be good to make a summary sheet based on functional groups, so here one is: Functional Group Summary Sheet (PDF) You can find other sheets in the Summary Sheets section of this site. In addition, I …

If you feel sometimes like mechanisms in carbonyl chemistry keep repeating themselves, you aren’t just imagining things. The fact is that there IS a lot of repetition. This has been covered before – the …

Part of the problem with nomenclature is that the trivial names can cause a lot of confusion. By themselves, the IUPAC names are at least logical, if sometimes unwieldy – it might be a good plan to just stick to…

I finally got around to putting together a summary sheet of the two previous series on mechanisms in carbonyl chemistry (anionic nucleophiles and neutral nucleophiles) It’s a companion piece to the summary sheet…

One of my students is taking an introductory organic chemistry course at a community college. While preparing for our next session, which is going to cover some of the basics of chemical reactivity, I found myself mak…

About Master Organic Chemistry

After doing a PhD in organic synthesis at McGill and a postdoc at MIT, I applied for faculty positions at universities and it didn’t work out, yada yada yada. So I decided to teach organic chemistry anyway! Master Organic Chemistry is the resource I wish I had when I was learning the subject.